


Sanguinem Lunam

by experiment264



Category: None - Fandom, Original Work
Genre: Blood, Blood Magic, Blood and Gore, Canon Non-Binary Character, Churches & Cathedrals, Cults, Death, Fantasy, Festivals, Human Sacrifice, Intersex, Magic, Magical Realism, Masks, Original Character(s), Other, Queer Themes, Rituals, Sacrifice, Spirit World, Spirits, Supernatural Elements, Venetian Masks, non-binary
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-16
Updated: 2018-07-16
Packaged: 2019-06-11 05:14:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,470
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15308262
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/experiment264/pseuds/experiment264
Summary: The correct way of tying them is when the Moon is full and a beating heart is ripped out of a living body.And she knows that, even when she doesn't know anything at all.





	Sanguinem Lunam

The light hurt her eyes.

Even through that thick layer of clouds covering the sky that she could barely make out in between the blurriness, the light hurt her eyes, and they watered down her cheeks.

She couldn’t feel the tears, though; she couldn’t feel anything at all.

Not her skin, not the beating of her heart, not the breeze; just the burning pain behind her eyelids that wouldn’t go away, and no matter how much she tried to make the tears in her eyes disappear, as well, she couldn’t. They made her vision blurry and unfocused, and she hated it.

She hated how she felt like her body wasn’t hers, too. But that she couldn’t do anything about.

So she closed her eyes shut.

A couple of minutes passed by, and she knew it because she counted every single one of the one hundred and twenty two seconds, until she tried to focus her pupils again, and this time, she managed to.

And she was confused, even more than before.

Past the trees and the cobblestone path surrounding her, the streets were filled with what looked like either monsters or gods, or maybe both.

Their faces were covered with masks of all types: some covered half of the face, others covered just the eyes, and some others covered the whole expanse of features. While some were painted with beautiful flowers, some others chose lace to give a look of enigma; some represented a gorgeous concept, and others were beautifully horrific and gruesome.

A man close to her wore a gigantic headpiece, covered in black and blue feathers, with the lower half of his dark-skinned face free, revealing black lips with a silver ring on them. He was holding another man’s hand in between his fingers, and he was a true sight to the eyes, dressed head to toe like a harlequin king, his hat looking more like a crown with all the heavy jewels that, somehow, weren’t crushing his skull.

Walking down the street was a woman that looked like she could be Death herself, attired in a gorgeous, elaborate black gown. And, mesmerisingly so, she fanned her stunning, carved in features with what looked like a feathered hand fan.

She blinked, from her place, and tried to swallow the spit that was gathering on the inside of her mouth.

What was she doing there, in between such mysterious creatures? What were they hiding beneath such masks?

And the music was just weird to her, although it went through her ears like smoke, as if trying to convince her to just loosen up and start dancing until her feet bled.

The people on the street did dance to it, though, holding each other and laughing with some sort of a cackling sound. It seemed as if they had joy instead of blood running through them.

Whatever she laid her eyes on, it seemed festive and picturesque, from the streets paved in red cobblestone just as the path of the park she sat on, to the stone-walled houses with potted plants hanging against them, all the way to the pointed rooftops and even the smell of wet soil that lingered in the air.

But everything seemed more like a painting and not so much real life, as if… as if she wasn’t meant to be there.

Her eyes pointed downwards to her own body, and she felt dizzy.

A red cloak.

* * *

 

_Dark red cloaks surround her, all of them leaning away from the wall behind their backs, chanting in a way that suggests they don’t understand a shred of the ancient language that’s so passionately pouring out of their mouths._

_Not the way she understands it._

_Their hands are covered by the thick sleeves of their attires, but they sway pendulums, moving them rhythmically at a slow pace, and the way they do it, it almost reminds her of a beating heart._

_When she manages to lift her gaze and make it travel across the room, she catches a crowd of shadows watching from all directions; on top of stairs and on top of boxes, hanging from chains, and sitting on the ledge of the darkened windows. They are all still, but their figures falter like smoke._

_It all feels way too familiar, way too strange._

_Even the floor she’s sprawled over feels that way, too. Made out of wood and stained dark in certain places, stains that seem almost black under the cold light that shines above everything._

_Because the moon shines through the skylight on the ceiling, high above her head, and through the tunnel of vicious dark clouds that surround it._

* * *

 

Her limbs started to tingle after she came back to her senses, and it almost scared her. Almost, because the feeling of being able to feel something other than the numb confusion that had filled her since the beginning, overtook her in a weird way.

And also the feeling of remembering something, anything, was overwhelming.

Who were those people of her memory? What where they doing, surrounding her that way, at that seemingly old and dirty warehouse?

But she couldn’t think for too long, because her lungs… her lungs burnt in a dim, uncomfortable way, as if the mucosae wasn’t used to oxygen.

She felt trapped somewhere in her skull, because when she started standing up from the wooden bench she was sitting on, barely conscious of it, her legs felt as if they were a baby bird’s supporting the weight of a full-grown human being, weak and without any sort of strength.

Still, she gave two steps. Two small, barely-even-there, steps, and, just as a roar of thunder rumbled through the sky, she was on the ground.

The small stones and pebbles severed the skin on her knees, the bottom of the cloak gathering like a tent around her lower body, and the tingling on her skin did nothing but accentuate the sharp pain that managed to trap her into her head, once again.

* * *

_She’s walking and laughter fills her ears, a song in between the constant chaos of her own existence._

_And a song is what someone sings, sweet and happy, with such a beautiful voice she thinks she might start singing too. But she doesn’t want to; she just wants to listen._

_Next to her walks another person with the palest of skins, almost white beneath the dim sunrays that manage to slip their way through the clouds. And their hair glimmers, a mess of platinum strands that look impossible to tame._

_They are smiling while singing, and she knows she’s the reason for that smile._

_Her right hand intertwines with their left one, contrasting sharply one against the other, but it feels as if it was the way it should be._

_Their porcelain arms are surrounded by inked branches with thorns and roses, and their fingers have runic shapes drawn onto them, although before she can focus on the skin between her own fingertips, their laughter fills her ears, and she fixates her eyes on theirs._

_She knows she hasn’t seen such black eyes anywhere else, so captivating yet so… empty._

_Weirdly, the only thing that she can think about before the light goes out, is that they’re not empty, it’s just that she’s meant to fill that space._

* * *

 

She was back on her feet and she was walking, even though she didn’t quite understand how; the sole of her feet felt as if she was walking on top of needles, but she didn’t care.

Neither did she care about the fact that she also felt needles on her body whenever the cloak rubbed against her skin or her gloves pressed against the tips of her fingers, because even if it hurt, all she could think about was her own name.

What was it? Why couldn’t she remember it?

Why couldn’t she remember her own damned name, or the name of the place she was walking on, or the reason behind the large cut on her wrist that hurt every single time she moved her gloved hand?

Something deep on her brain told her that none of that mattered the least bit, but that there was a question she desperately needed to answer: who were them? Who was the person with the haunting, void-like eyes?

She squeezed her hand against her wrist, barely even paying attention to the pain behind the pins and needles feeling, but it was the way a droplet of blood fell onto the path beneath her feet what made something spark behind her eyelids.

* * *

 

_The room is cold. Not only physically, but spiritually cold, as if the souls of the people around her have been surrendered to something older than the souls themselves. And they are protectively guarding over whatever is below that cloth, all the way across the warehouse and at the top of a flight of stairs._

_The dozens of them keep chanting and swaying the pendulums, and the chant burns her eardrums as if it had a drop of sulphur for every word spoken._

_Maybe they were demons, with their claws and teeth ready to dismember their prey._

_And she almost wants them to dismember her, if that means feeling anything other than that freezing tension that makes the air feel like ice._

_It almost had a nightshade smell to it._

_Almost as if…_

* * *

She felt too much, and her skin was like raw flesh; the slightest touch of the material of her clothing had stopped feeling like pins and needles, and it started to emulate the way a blade would when slicing through skin.

And the actual cut across her wrist was burning as if embers had been pressed viciously on it.

The people around her… they didn’t help matters, at all, with their constant movement which made her head want to implode and tear her own eyeballs out of their sockets.

A sudden shard of pain shot across her arm, and she hissed, turning her body towards whatever it was that was holding her by the forearm and trying to pull her towards the middle of the street.

It was just a nun, cladded in black and white, but her face… her face had her eyes and her mouth sewed shut with a thick, brown thread. Blood dripped from the incisions, and she realized, way too late, that it was just a mask.

Just a mask.

She shivered, and not only because of the sight, but because the firm grasp of the woman made her want to tear her own flesh off, even through the layer of protection that her own robes gave her.

“Come dance with me, would you?” The woman asked, and when her hand gave a squeeze, she could feel the sharp pain on her marrow traveling all the way through her spine.

* * *

 

_A stone altar raises at the top of the stairs, imposing, when the cloth is removed and the hooded people stand aside, avoiding the dark stone and the way it reeks of something pulled out of the spirit realm._

_That irregular parody of an altar is not meant to be anywhere near the living, and she knows it._

_How could she not imagine it before? Someone is ought to be finished there._

_The dozens of strangers seem to be waiting for blood, but not hers, though; that they would have gotten a long, long time ago if they really wanted it._

_No, the blood they wait for has to be released on top of that altar, and she knows it because someone is cleansing it with incense and sage._

_And then a broad person walks past her, carrying another thin one, covered in a white cloak._

_“Such pure, white fabric doesn’t belong in a place like this,” she thinks, pointlessly, while the person is stood in front of the altar._

_They stand weirdly, and when the broad, cloaked individual, holds them in place, they start coughing. Their white cloak gets stained with red._

_A hand, all of the sudden, yanks away the white covering._

_And they are naked, with their milky skin covered in tattoos and their ambiguous genitalia for everyone to see. A pendant that looks like a drop of blood hangs from their slim neck._

_The eyes are what give them away, though._

_And once she’s noticed, even through the darkness that slips through the crooks and crevices of her grey matter, she can’t tear her gaze out of those black orbs; it is them._

_They look at her, surrendered, tired, and the message written across those carved-in-marble features is clear, even when they don’t even move their stained lips:_ you are not to blame.

_Yet, she feels the guilt panging across her chest like a knife._

_She is to blame for it all._

_A hand tugs harshly at the hair on top of their head, causing them to retreat their lips in a growl-like motion, and blood pours generously out of their mouth._

_She then tries to scream, the effort of doing so burning her tight throat and her mind, but no sound makes its way past her teeth._

* * *

 

She was still walking, and scurrying away from the nun, when the rain began to fall, hitting her.

First off, it was nothing more than a caress against her still sensitive epidermis, even when it only hit her neck and nape, and it didn’t seem to bother the masquerade attendants.

They laughed and regained their dancing, turning the volume of the music up, and she almost wanted to join them. The energy floating through the air was magical, and the smell of rain didn’t quite overpower the stench of liquor.

The people congregated in different places across the streets, all of them exhuding energy and joy, whatever it was what they were doing; dancing alone, in couples, in groups, or even singing horrendously at the top of their lungs.

Why wear masks, though? Why hide one’s identity in such a manner? And why would one seem so content by doing so?

It seemed as if she should know why they were happy about, but she truthfully couldn’t remember.

And she didn’t care.

But then the rain gained strength, and she felt, once again, blades cutting through her flesh.

She began walking faster, her feet feeling raw and her legs still trembling, but even that was better than to stay still and wait for someone to try and touch her once again.

She shivered just thinking about it.

When lightning hit the sky, she started running without even contemplating it, because it was as if the grey firmament had opened up to pour itself on top of the town.

Running felt odd, as if it was a new sensation, but yet she did for a while, experiencing a singular feeling when she noticed herself getting out of breath.

She went pass a couple of children with sad and happy masks and almost hit a man who was gulping beer out of a keg straight in the head, because she couldn’t stop running; her legs were now moving on their own, even when her lungs wouldn’t stop burning and her mouth was kept agape, gasping for air.

And then she couldn’t do it anymore.

She stalled abruptly in front of an alley, gasping and panting.

Just a couple of seconds before she tried to start running once again, because the rain was hitting her cranium even with her hair to protect it, the sight on the entrance of the alley distracted her, even if for a couple of seconds, from the fiery pain across her chest.

Two women, unashamedly bashing their half-masked faces against one another while groping their heavily clothed bodies, leant against a wooden door, darkened by the rain.

One of them looked like gluttony in her attire, while the other seemed to represent greed, and they were soaked, head to toe. And yet, they didn’t seem to care about the pouring rainfall as much as she did, because they were laughing and biting each other like puppies.

And then lightning flashed across the sky, closely followed by a loud clap of thunder, and that was the only thing needed to take her back.

* * *

 

_The chanting is rotting her ears from the inside out, but that isn’t nearly what hurts her the most; it is seeing them up there, because it is no one’s fault but hers._

_But that is her purpose, right? To be the one to blame._

_And now they are being lifted and held against the stone altar, their wrists harshly slammed against the mossy stone, and a whimper can be heard across the warehouse, making her eyes tear up._

_Is then when she spots the dark bruising across the hipbones and the ribcage, and she wants it to be her._

_She would rather have the cloaked people hurt her than hurt them. They don’t deserve it._

_And then the people chanting begin walking, still swaying their damned pendulums and with their heads leant towards their chests, and it almost seems as if they can’t lift them up due to respect._

_But she just wants to spit at their faces._

_She feels trapped, and she tries to scoot away, but the only thing that she manages to do by trying to do so, is to feel a cold, steady thing against her back, to which her wrists feel tied to. And her muscles… her muscles feel filled with glass, so sore and swollen, that she thinks maybe they weren’t the only one beaten heartless._

_The cloaked figures continue walking, steadily, slowly, while they still whimper on the stone altar, wrists and ankles now tied with a red string._

_They aren’t even trying to fight against their restraints, and it hurts her. It hurts her to watch them surrender just like that_

_And from her point of view, she can make out perfectly the way blood pours out of their mouth whenever they cough, spotting their skin even more._

_She tries to push herself to her knees, but she can’t quite do so, and the only thing that her eyes can now focus on, is the moon, shining through the skylight like the ancestral being it is._

* * *

 

She was jogging, her heart beating at such a fast rate it could burst, but she couldn’t stop.

A primal urge was moving her, and it told her to find them. To find them before anyone else could, and to protect them with everything she had.

And then she was jogging up a flight of stairs, directly towards the gigantic wooden doors of a monumental cathedral that looked like it had lifted itself up from the depths of the Earth, with its tall columns and pillars, and the roaring gargoyles on the nave roof and on the edges of the building.

It might had been her heavy clouded brain, but she could swear the gargoyles were directly pointing towards her, preparing to attack.

She felt dizzy upon looking at the sacred place, but the rain was getting stronger, and even when the people were filling their veins with alcohol, she just wanted to hide from the rain that threatened to cut through her skin.

So she put the whole of her weight against the doors, and it felt as if her fingers, beneath the gloves, were sticking to the leather.

Was she sweating? Was that what happened when you ran for way too long?

But she managed to get through the doors, the sound echoing across the nave as if it was the roar of one of the gargoyles, and she found herself marvelled at the beauty of the warm light coming from the chandelier, and the rich incense smell.

* * *

 

_Incense._

_They smell like incense._

_It goes up her nostrils and fills her senses, and they feel like absolute home; between their arms, she feels safe and sound, filled with the hope of a new tomorrow, and even when there is the impending coming of something dark, she wants to feel happy._

_Even when both of them are fugitives._

_But right now they are swaying across a checkered floor, dancing like one, swirling and twirling between the other hundred couples, giggling and holding onto each other for dear life._

_Chandeliers light the ballroom, making everything seem warm and wonderful, from the ball gowns to the musicians on stage, their fingers almost bleeding with the passion they are playing with._

_And she feels like she can reach towards the sky and grab any star, because the arms holding her, even if thin, are strong like iron and know their way around her waist._

_She slides her fingers through thin, platinum hair, and buries her nose against their neck. Her own brown locks fall on the side of her face, and she can feel them, ever so tall, nuzzling the top of her head._

_“Rohese.” They whisper, softly, and everything falls down as if made out of smoke._

* * *

 

_“Rohese!” They cry out, laughing._

_And her head breaks the surface tension, her lungs breathing in the warm air as soon as she can._

_Around her, the cave seems to amplify the sound a hundred times, repeating her name until it’s undistinguishable between the stalactites that threaten to fall onto them like swords._

_But neither of them have ever feared swords._

_“That was cheating!” she hits them on the shoulder, wet skin hitting wet skin, while still breathing uneasily._

_“Was not,” they laugh, pinching their nose and throwing their head back into the clear water, just to get the hair out of their eyes. “It’s just that you’re way too slow.”_

_“I’m not slow!” Rohese exclaims, but can’t help smirking._

_“You are!”_

_“I’m not!”_

_“Oh, want to bet? Again?” And they lift a single, pale eyebrow._

_She just laughs it off and takes them by the neck, looking down at their agape mouth._

_But it’s them who presses both of their lips together, and the two of them are laughing like mischievous goblins while they kiss._

_And the only image in her mind is the full moon reflecting on their black eyes while they say her name._

* * *

 

Rohese! It was Rohese!

It felt like a puzzle piece falling into place, and it reverberated comfortably against her skull, although she didn’t have the time to feel the waves of it across her body; she felt warm.

Warm, all of the sudden, and maybe because of the memory or because of the candles, but she hadn’t realized how cold she actually was.

So she walked through the aisles and the benches, letting the smell of incense fill her lungs, and it burned at first, but soon it made her feel peaceful. Even the horrible feeling across her body started to subside.

Her skin felt tight against her bones, but it felt right.

The ceiling was covered with paintings, small cherubs chasing each other, and angels whispering in human’s ears. Even some devils found home between the seraphic beings, stealing fruit from their baskets or pinching their beautiful, feathery wings with their long claws.

A chandelier interrupted the imagery just in the centre, but the transition was smooth between the painting and the golden base, with swirls of pure, shining gold running through it and falling, gracefully, all the way down to the candleholders.

And a hundredth of candles shone and dripped wax down to the space beneath them, and she noticed it when a droplet fell against her midfoot.

Had she been barefoot all that time?

Not much time was given to her to think about it, because soon she was encapsulated on the eyes of the saints across both of the sides of the aisles, north and south: the look their faces carried was severe, judgemental, but an instinctual flash of pride arose in her chest.

The music hit the casket of the church just as the downpour did, and, somehow, it reminded her that she was ought to be doing something important.

She was ought to be looking for something important.

She passed by in front of an almost black window, far too deep into the south porch to be regularly cleaned from the dust and smoke that it had gathered across the centuries, and her own reflection shook her.

She could only make out her figure from the waist up, even when the statue of the Virgin Mary stood in the way, but the first thing she noticed, was the long strands of jet black, wet hair, and the way they fell all the way down to her ribs, all tangled up with a red pendant that hanged from his neck.

That wasn’t the most noticeable thing, though; it was the whole-face mask.

Completely made out of gold and adorned with swirls and black gemstones, it seemed impossible to have missed, but yet she had.

And so, she took it out.

* * *

 

_The chanting is torture to her eardrums, at first spoken in an almost mellifluous way, but now tearing to shreds the insides of her brain._

_But she understands it to the last vowel, unlike the people singing as if their lives depend on it._

_It speaks about blood oaths and duty, heritage and belonging, curses and bonding and surrendering bodies to the will of the ancestral._

_Every word the cloaked people speak, every single one harsher than the previous one, feels to her like a knife pulling apart her soul from her flesh, and she wants to scream, though she can’t; she wants to pull her eyes out, but she feels as if they might just fall out on their own; she wants to scratch her skin until it rips, but there is crimson on the floor, so maybe she has already done it._

_But the absolute worst part of it, what makes her cry blood, is that they are there; naked, still so secure against the altar that it must hurt, with dark blood staining their beautiful skin, with no other choice but to surrender._

_And they have._

_They have already surrendered, because they are not forcing against the restraints, and they just look at her right in the eyes, with those two onyx, ageless spheres, that manage to gather all the sadness in the world; they are sorry for her, as if her destiny matters to them much more than their own._

_She is soon tasting her own blood in her tears._

_Another cloaked figure walks through the warehouse, barefoot, incensory in hand, and passes Rohese without even glancing at her, chanting loudly and sternly, understanding every last word as they do so, unlike the rest._

_The figure goes up the ten steps of the stairs, slow and sinuous as a snake, walks around the stone altar, and then stands at the other side of it._

_Facing her._

_And Rohese’s eyes widen when a pair of pale hands are lifted, holding a ceremonial dagger in between them._

_The obsidian dagger catches a ray of moonlight and it hits her in the eyes, burning even if the light is dim, but it’s enough to rip her away from her darkness-induced slumber._

_She screams past the knives stuck in her throat, and even though her mouth fills with blood and the muscles on her neck threaten to rip, she doesn’t stop._

* * *

 

Shivers began running up and down her spine, and soon she was crawling past the main altar, and towards the baptismal font.

The faces of the saints, and even the face of Christ himself, still condemned her, but all strength had been taken out of her. And the ground beneath her body felt so cold, it might as well had been pure ice.

She was crying, a waterfall streaming down her face, burning hot against her suddenly cold skin.

Why did she feel so cold and so weak?

And why had those black eyes stared right through hers with such… belonging, as if looking at each other was the way it was meant to be since the beginning of time?

She leant against the font, trying to grasp onto the lustrous rose quartz, but the hands beneath the gloves still felt like they were sticking to the leather.

She bit back a sob, because she wanted them, even if she didn’t know their name or anything about them, even if she couldn’t remember, but she knew… oh, she knew, in the deepest parts of her hurting soul, that they were what mattered.

The only thing that did.

* * *

 

_She can’t stop screaming, even if the sound can just be compared to a rock scratching against another one, and it does feel like it on the insides of her larynx._

_They are still looking at her, as if begging, as if asking her to stop and to resign._

_Can she? Should she?_

_No, not ever; not even as her own damned blood drips down her chin when her throat decides to rip from the inside and the metallic taste covers her tongue._

_So they mouth her name, once again, and it is as if she can hear their voice, quiet and pliant, on the insides of her mind._

_No, it isn’t as if; she can._

_“Rohese,” they whisper, softly, painfully. “We are always living on borrowed time.”_

_“You will be gone—“_

_“And I will be back. I always do.”_

_“I don’t want to do this anymore.”_

_“We always come back, love, even when it hurts, and even if we fight. No matter how many times they do it, we are meant to find each other, that’s the way it’s supposed to be. That’s the way they want it to be.”_

_“Please, Elvan.”_

_But they whisper three more words, and that is it. Rohese is on her own inside of the riot on her head once again._

_And the chanting stops when the figure slits their own left wrist, blood dripping down to Elvan’s chest and on top of the pendant, which starts to glimmer under the dark liquid._

_The chanting stops, but then it begins again, horribly, and it’s the person holding the dagger the one chanting in that weird voice, bittersweet and painful to the soul, while Elvan keeps their eyes locked on hers, dark and awaiting._

_She can’t look anywhere else, because she is pleading them to not leave, when the person holing the dagger lifts their own head and a pale face shines under the moonlight._

_And, suddenly and unexpectedly, the dagger is down._

* * *

 

She was absolutely quivering against the quartz, trying to lift the remaining of her mind and body towards the water.

Why? She certainly did not know, but it felt as if she should; maybe it was to wash away the tears, maybe to drink it, or maybe just to feel anything that would bring her back to Earth.

She had not been warm for a while anymore, as she was, again, cold, shivering, and the cloak was not enough to shelter her naked body.

And even when she felt so exposed, her soul was covered with a thick layer of tar that she couldn’t make go away.

So she just held her own knees against her chest, and she cried over the dark red cloak, soaking through the fabric.

The music from the outside grew louder, distorted through the walls of the cathedral, and she loathed the way it made her bones tremble, nor did she like the way lightning and thunder fought on top of the chaos of her own head.

But still, she looked through a stained glass, and the moon pulled her back.

* * *

 

_The dagger slides through muscle and bone, and a shriek shakes the windows from top to bottom, web-like cracks running through the old glass. The ground shakes too just as a gale strikes the building and slips through the new cracks on the windows, and she can feel old, archaic energy, releasing itself all over her, when a hand reaches inside Elvan’s chest and grabs their heart as if it was a doll’s, taking it out in one swift move._

_Blood spurs like a fountain from where their heart used to be, and they are no longer making any sound, having gone faster than blowing a candle._

_Bodies die at an agonizingly fast pace, she finds out, because by the time she blinks through burning eyelids, their black eyes are fixed upon hers once again, but this time, they have turned off._

_The windows break to pieces when she roars from the deepest part of her spirit, and even the moon covers itself in clouds._

* * *

 

She felt so cold, from the top layer of her skin to the centre of each of her bones, and the shivering just made her want to empty her intestines through her mouth.

The images on her head were repeating themselves a thousand times per second.

And she could feel every tiny feeling arising on her; anger, guilt, pain, impotence, fury… but, overall, she felt lost.

Lost in a world without them, and lost without any useful memory besides the ones who hurt her, and lost with nowhere to call home.

And those damned gloves… they just fell wrong against the skin on her hands, the sweat drying and gluing her fingers to the leather, her skin itching painfully.

So she yanked off one of them with her teeth.

The ancient cathedral shook from the smallest of pebbles to the tallest of the columns, and even the gargoyles wailed when she bawled.

* * *

 

_It hurts._

_No, it doesn’t hurt; hurt is bearable._

_Dying feels like lava pouring through her veins, as if all the nerve endings on her body have shrunken and then expanded only to then explode, cell by cell, atom by atom._

_She would give anything to tear the skin off of her bones, but then again, her hands are paralyzed by the pain… and that noise, her own screaming, it’s like the roar of a cyclone._

_The only thing she’s able to feel, is pain; pain on her chest, as the muscles of her heart tear apart, and on her head, when every vein dies and rips and pours itself all over her grey matter._

_And then, blood; blood inside of her mouth and her eyes, and making its way rapidly up from her stomach, making her want to vomit, but then she can’t, because her stomach has just imploded inside of her body, and she can feel the hydrochloric acid dripping all over her organs and accelerating the way they rot. Although that was a breeze, because when her ribs constrict and puncture her lungs, suffocating her, that is when her body pushes all of the blood and pieces of viscera out through her mouth._

_And then, darkness._

_The darkness covers her like a blanket and leaves her in silent agony._

* * *

 

Why wasn’t she dead?

How could she even breathe after that?

Even if it was the flash of a memory, she could feel the ghost of the pain across her body, and it only made her shake and tremble beneath the cloak that covered her freezing flesh.

And the blood on her fingers made her want to rip them off, but she couldn’t, because while the gloves rested a couple of feet from her, her digits were moving, mindlessly, across the marble floor of the cathedral; runes were being scattered across the surface, oxidising quickly and becoming a horrible shade of brown under the warm light of the holy place.

She knew where that blood had come from.

And she hated herself for it.

Her jaw quivered violently, but still, a crippling voice was being pulled out of her vocal chords while her hands moved on their own.

She was responding to the chanting from her memories.

And it, too, burned her ears and her tongue.

But it made sense.

It made sense, and she knew exactly what to do, even before her memory was put in place like a brick on a wall.

She was ought to find Elvan.

* * *

_The skin is like butter, it always is; it cuts softly and smoothly, with a satisfying feel to it._

_Muscle gives resistance, and one can feel the tug of the fibres on one’s fingertips, even through the layers of onyx and leather from the dagger._

_Wind blows and the windows crack before she pulls their heart out with clawed fingernails, and it beats twice in her hand before stopping, just as Elvan’s soul, the easiest one to conquer, begins to scurry away from their body, as they have done countless times before the moon brings them back from that void where they both came from in the beginning of everything, and to where Elvan goes whenever they are sacrificed again._

_The unravelling of Elvan's spirit always fills them all with energy._

_Soon after, the poisoned body of the host starts to scream and pant to the best that she can muster, even making the moon hide itself away and turning the windows into small, diamond-like confetti._

_Every one of them surrounding the room is protected from such dark magic, though._

_She used to love it all, even the part when she offers her own blood to the moon before sacrificing Elvan, but that was centuries ago._

_Now, it’s nothing more than the duty of the High Priestess, and she accepts it with the honour that it means, even when it isn’t the only duty she has to take honourably._

_She has other duties, ones that she has given herself up to._

_Rohese isn’t meant to be held by any human; she is too powerful and archaic for that, and needs a new body._

_A more sacred one._

_So Seble looks across the room, still chanting, to the decaying form of the old host, with her pretty brown hair and mocha skin rapidly becoming nothing more than pulp in between her shrieking and convulsing. That host lasted a lot less than she had predicted from the beginning, and it only means that Rohese and Elvan are getting stronger._

_But the abilities of them both are still very much needed, even if it means playing a God._

_The sounds of the host dying vary from time to time, but this one is one of the most gut-wrenching things she has ever heard coming from the host’s throat, while the body turns to nothing more than a bloody pile of flesh and a pendant that shines below the few moon rays when the satellite comes out from its hiding place once again._

_It is what needs to be done, every single time._

_Every single time, she thinks, when she yells the last part of the chant. But this one is the last one._

_When a hooded figure walks steadily towards her and hangs the sanguinem lunam around her neck, she is not afraid at all._

_And the darkness welcomes her._

**Author's Note:**

> Hey there! So... yeah, that happened. I'm incredibly sorry if the story has any misspellings or anything, as English is not my first language, so if you see anything that you think is worth pointing out, please let me know.
> 
> Thank you for stopping by!


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